Janrain SDK for iOS 5 Released as Apple Holds Onto Top Spot for Mobile Buying on Christmas Day

2011 is wrapping up as another banner year for mobile adoption and Apple continues to sit in the center of it. Even though tough economic conditions are credited with a slight drop of their marketshare in Europe and Amazon’s Kindle Fire is starting to rip into the lower end of their tablet market, Apple is still expected to move over 40 million mobile devices this quarter, setting another company record.

How we use these devices is also continuing to evolve. IBM just released some very impressive benchmarks, showing that 13.4% of online buyers on Christmas Day made their purchases from Apple iPads and iPhones this year. This is on top of a general 16% growth in online sales from Christmas Day 2010.

All of this translates into a larger market opportunity for developers building iOS Apps. On the other hand, with so many other apps in the marketplaces, this makes it harder for developers to create useful apps that can be easily found.

Connect to social to drive engagement, retention and discovery

Janrain provides a few key capabilities that help improve your app’s experience and aid in app discovery through the major social networks:

Encourage engagement and acquire new users:Our SDK enables your users to share content, awards, status and more to multiple social networks, email or SMS. Your app’s users become evangelists when they broadcast from your applications to their friends and contacts. This is a great opportunity to drive their friends to download from within the shared message.

Improved registration experience:Give your users a head start by adding social sign-in to your app reducing the amount of effort they need to expend creating yet another account.

Highlights from our latest update for iOS5

Last week we released the latest version of our iOS SDK for Engage that includes a few key additions.

Formalized support for iOS 5/Xcode 4

Improved support for orientation changes

New preview UI element in sharing dialog.

Pick which providers to display – configurable at run-time so that you can have different options exposed in your app than your Website.